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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • My bootstraps broke when I pulled them harder.

    Turns out the local company that made bootstraps for 125 years was bought out by a hedge fund, which promptly fired all of the workers and subcontracted manufacturing to a company in Sri Lanka who could make them much cheaper by using inferior materials and by paying the Sri Lankan workers in 6 months what a fired local worker made in a day.

    Ironically, the hedge fund CEO with the MBA he received as a legacy admission to Cornell only wears slippers because fuck you, I’m the boss.








  • Which probably lifted it from the 1992 movie “Army of Darkness”, starring Bruce Campbell:

    Ash: Alright you primitive screw heads, listen up. You see this?

    This…is my boomstick! It’s a twelve-gauge double barrel Remington. S-Mart’s top of line. You can find this in the sporting goods department.

    That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids,Michigan. Retails for about $109.95. It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt steel barrel, and hair trigger. Shop smart, shop S-Mart.



  • if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

    In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.

    This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.

    You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.

    For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.

    It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.

    Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.

    Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.

    Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:

    The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.











  • Someone has already submitted a PR with the changes the dev recommended. The captcha stuff is in a new db table instead of in-memory at the websocket server.

    However, from one of the devs:

    One note, is that captchas (and all signup blocking methods) being optional, it still won’t prevent people from creating bot-only instances. The only effective way being to block them, or switch to allow-only federation.

    Once people discover the lemmy-bots that have been made that can bypass the previous captcha method, it also won’t help (unless a new captcha method like the suggested ones above are implemented).

    The root of the issue seems to be that they’ve removed websockets, for the following reasons:

    Huge burden to maintain, both on the server and in lemmy-ui. Possible memory leaks. Not scalable.

    I can understand them wanting to make their lives a bit easier (see "huge burden to maintain) - Lemmy has exploded recently (see “not scalable”) and there are far bigger issues to fix, and an even larger number of bad actors (see “possible memory leaks”) who have learned about Lemmy at the same time as everyone else and want to exploit or break it.